Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with Ontology Concepts at Design-Time

In business process modelling, it is known that using a consistent labelling style and vocabulary improves process model quality. In this regard, several existing approaches aim at the linguistic support for labelling model elements. At the same time, domain-specific ontologies have been proposed and used to capture important process-related knowledge. However, these two areas are largely disconnected up to now. Although some research suggests annotating ontology concepts to process models, for instance, to interpret and reason about a process model, annotation has not yet gained traction in practice since it still has to be done in a highly manual effort. We thus provide an automated, language-independent methodology for using labelling assistance functionalities to identify and annotate relevant ontology concepts to process model elements using a four-step procedural model.